Data has a story to tell

With data being generated faster than ever before, you need tools to help you easily find this data and combine it with data from your own organization. Microsoft helps you easily find relevant data wherever it lives — in the confines of your business or from the cloud.

With business intelligence tools built right into Excel, and supercharged by a powerful back-end data platform in SQL Server, Microsoft makes it easier for everyone to discover new insights and uncover new connections and relationships across data sets.

Powerful, familiar tools to make BI accessible and engaging

Data is growing faster than ever before. The days of having to worry about what data is kept and stored and having to put it through lengthy IT cleansing processes is over. Now it’s about mining through mountains of data – often of different types and in real time. As the amount of available data increases, how can people best use this for their needs — whether that’s looking for new business opportunities, finding competitive differentiators, or just keeping operations running smoothly?

Microsoft business intelligence solutions are designed to help people go from idea to insight quickly. From BI in Excel to more advanced analytics in SQL Server, Microsoft covers the entire spectrum of data analysis needs—all with a familiar set of tools that don’t require people to learn new ways of doing things. People can create their own reports in Excel and take advantage of advanced capabilities that had previously been locked behind complex and hard-to-use tools.

Now people can create stunning, interactive views from any data using Excel 2013 — all without writing any code. And business meetings can be even more productive when people can present and make real-time decisions using interactive charts and reports that can be changed on the fly directly in PowerPoint. Share and collaborate with other people by using SharePoint while retaining the rich data-linked visualizations that were built in Excel.

Easy access to data, big and small

Building data warehousing solutions for analytics can be difficult and costly — often with an analytics solution that's outdated before it's even released. With more data than ever being generated more quickly than ever, businesses don't have time for lengthy projects.

The good news is, you can count on Microsoft tools to work together and scale seamlessly — whether you're looking at small data in Excel or a multi-petabyte data warehouse. You can easily transition from running simple queries in Excel to connecting to managed reports available through SharePoint.

A complete data platform

Data science and other analytics follow a common path to getting an answer. First, you identify and form your questions. Then you find and combine the available data, often from multiple sources, and run analyses. And often, you run this question-to-answer process multiple times. For organizations to get the most competitive edge, it's often about getting meaningful results quickly.

Microsoft's complete and unified data platform allows IT to leverage existing skills and rapidly develop powerful data-driven solutions giving them the technical agility to focus on what matters most to the business. Microsoft offers this in a familiar and robust database solution—SQL Server, bolstered by a rich set of complementary and powerful technologies connected to the cloud in Microsoft Azure. With Microsoft, IT has robust tools to handle virtually any data-driven problem.

And for applications, Microsoft's "any-data, anywhere" approach lets developers work seamlessly with any data regardless of type, structure or location without having to worry about scale, performance, security or availability. It's easy for developers to take advantage of Microsoft's complete data platform with data management tools and support for data manipulation, including relational, non-relational and streaming, through tools like Visual Studio. In fact, IT can also build and run data-driven applications using on-premises software or Microsoft Azure.

Advertising agencies have long sought a simple way to gauge the effectiveness of the campaigns they create for their clients. Using Power BI for Office 365, media agency MediaCom is analyzing paid and earned media activity in order to quickly optimize campaign performance and “spend” across every channel. The process takes just days, and the company can now drive better campaign performance, as well as increase their productivity by up to millions of dollars per campaign.

Why Microsoft

There are plenty of vendors who claim to meet your big data needs, but their solutions are not usually designed to handle today’s new data sources or built to take full advantage of the cloud. Some try to sell you on complex, expensive hardware solutions that are difficult to use while others provide limited data visualization solutions that address only one issue at a time. See how Microsoft offers a complete, flexible data platform that helps everyone at businesses like yours, from the front office to the server room, unlock insights from any data, big and small, no matter where it resides.